STELLA DONNELLY – LIVE: REVIEW
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
STELLA DONNELLY
Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, February 19
SHE IS THAT ENTHUSIASTIC best friend who’s always got something excellent to tell you. Grinning as she approaches maybe, furrowed brow on another day, but always tapping you on the arm or chest like she is bursting to share or to dance. Or both. At the same time. Not surprisingly, you find yourself doing it too, unintentionally mirroring at first, then succumbing to the mood and the mode, joining in comfortably.
A bit like the night’s opening song, Standing Ovation, which began as a soft, slow mood piece of uncertain colour that opened out to febrile bass and a skipping rhythm, and all of a sudden we were all singing as if this kiss-off of regrets was a party we did want to attend. Or maybe it’s the flipside, Year Of Trouble, a newish “sad old ballad”, done alone at the keyboards, as forlorn as the night she went back – to regret or rework or just understand – and “Parked far away from your new place/I needed the walk”.
Appropriately communal, this was being done with a reasonably full-figured band of multiple keyboards, multiple guitars and multiple voices – enabling a choice of boy backing vocals stage right or girl backing vocals stage left – and eventually multiple collaborations with the audience, vocally and onstage.
Obviously it’s not always a pretty story – though Stella Donnelly would probably apologise each time, as if it’s her fault it happened – and sometimes it can get downright ugly. The (appropriately) bitter slicing through offensive men of various shades in the older trio, Boys Will Be Boys, Beware Of The Dogs and Old Man, made for a bracing bracket, the first of them coming with a content warning, though for subject matter, not language.
But even then Donnelly’s not-so-secret weapons, a flair for melodies that could keep a cruise ship buoyant and a turn of phrase that can’t help but catch the ear, will usher you along even the darkest path. It’s why, the Chappell Roan cover in the encore notwithstanding, the best way to think of her wares is to imagine a cross between the sad-eyed adulthood of Holly Throsby and the perpetual teenhood of Ben Lee.
As a final note of serendipity, that Old Man, a song where the sheath is velvet but the blade is Japanese steel for a certain type of predatory male, was being performed at the same time as a former prince was being taken into custody elsewhere was quite piquant.
I reckon that could be a story for her to tell next time. Enthusiastically.
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Stella Donnelly plays
Lion Arts Factory, Adelaide, February 27
Corner Hotel, Melbourne, February 28 and March 1
The Rechabite, Perth, March 6
A version of this review was originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald.